My Food Job Rocks!

I met Lumeng Jin at the now discontinued Heart Healthy Competition in Chicago about 5 years ago. We participated in the same product development competition and kept in touch because that’s what you’re supposed to do as a student. In case you’re wondering, Lumeng’s team won that competition. I’m not bitter at all! Anyways, I wanted Lumeng on the show because she’s on the side of the industry that...

Today we have an exciting episode with Claudia Sidoti, who not only owned her restaurant at 19, but also wrote recipes for the Food Network, and now is the head honcho at Hello Fresh’s North America’s division. As many know, meal kits have gotten a ton of buzz too, but I always wanted to know how the R+D process worked. I asked Claudia how her team develops recipes and wow, I was super surprised h...

As you recall in episode 110, I interviewed at the intro to food science class in NCSU and had a blast. Now we continue with Dr. Gabriel Keith Harris’ story. Like many, his path to food science was unconventional, though he’s always had an interest with food, he went through the dietetics path until someone said he was interested in food science! Gabe’s main focus in the academic world is how food...

Julie Wilson is a serial entrepreneur who’s started multiple businesses in the comfort of her home. As many know, this is the dream! You see it all the time on facebook and youtube, right? Julie and I dispel the fictions on starting an online business and also talk about the best steps to start your own. But more importantly, Julie is the marketing arm of FreshCheq, a really innovative software th...

This episode was recorded at Expo West! Shannon Gomes and I connected on linkedin and just decided to wing a podcast episode while I was there. We found a table early in the morning and just did an episode. The world of Public Relations is something I’ve always been curious about. What do they do? How do they reach out to media outlets? These and many other questions are what I ask Shannon today....

>>>Win Jessica's book by clicking this link, and in the comments, say you were from My Food Job Rocks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I help Debomitra Dey and Soniya Katekar design their website through a conference call. I’ve done this before, but I wanted to post this up so eventually, if you would like to create a blog, or Instagram account, or podcast, you can use this as a way to motivate you, or at least see how I get motivated to do things. In this episode, I drill down on the purpose on how I structure my website,...

I’m sure you've heard a lot about Tyson Foods investing in a lot of cutting edge companies. Beyond Meat, Memphis Meats, and Tovala to name a few. I wanted to get to the bottom of this, so I asked Tom Mastrobuoni to talk about the reasons why Tyson is putting a stake into these companies. His answer surprised me. To get ahead and be truly innovative, Tyson knows that it has to be invested in these...

Fred Hart contacted me after listening to my interview with Hugh Thomas and was so inspired by it, he contacted me to be on the show. Fred’s pretty legit, he’s been a speaker for Expo West, has an awesomely inspiring team, and the dude just oozes passion. We talk a lot about the power of branding, and the nuances it really takes to make a brand stand out. We don’t only say the power of say, words,...

Sebastien messaged me on linkedin and said he was impressed by his work. Being the snoop that I am, I checked out his profile and found he was a food photographer! Hmmmm I never had a food photographer on the show…. I decided to interview Sebastien to understand the art of photography and what I got out of it was an interview about the amazing feeling interviewing creative people. Sebastien isn’t...

This is my take on an entrepreneur interview. Most if not all of the questions are free form in some way so this was an…interesting episode. It takes a while for Keenan and I to warm up, to get on each other’s wavelength, but you’ll get some amazing dialog at the end of the episode. Originally supposed to be an episode about ethics, this became an episode about people. How do you find good people,...

As you’ve heard in episode 112 with Todd Barr and 114 with David Mahoney, Analytics becomes an ever powerful technology to save the world. Yet the subject is pretty dense and hard to grasp. In most cases, it requires coding. I bring Uwe Hohgrawe on the show to talk a bit more about analytics and his answers surprised me. It’s actually better to be a subject matter expert first and then dive into t...

Can you patent your grandma’s cookies? No, but it can be a trade secret. David works as a lawyer at a really cool company that you’ve probably never heard of: Indigo Ag. From what I've gathered, the company uses data and analytics to find the optimal place to grow plants all around the world. David’s path to being a lawyer was unconventional but synergizes very well with what he was passionate abo...

If you’re in the non-profit space, what do you have to do to jump through the hoops and get funded on your project that will help your community? This is the question I asked Ted Johnson today. Ted leads an incubator that helps push these projects to get funded and we go through multiple scenarios on how to get community projects funded. This includes things I’ve never known. Some examples include...

  We shoot around the topic of big data around, but it’s hard for us to understand what that actually means. Luckily, Todd Barr helps break down not only Big Data, but also gives us a taste of the fascinating world of Geographic Information Systems, and Precision Agriculture. Using drones, tractors, or anything that scans data, Todd can gather mass amounts of data, organize it, and give hyper-targ...

  To kick off our Northeastern Lecture Series, I give you an episode that feels like a spy flick than anything else. Mitchell leads and manages food spies who look for food fraud in various companies and his mission in life is to make food authentic. This was all inspired by a food safety incident in China. So this episode brings us to the complex world of food fraud, and how Mitchell promotes foo...

You may remember Darin in episode 73 where he talked about his life-long crusade to improve food safety. We’ve kept in touch and he asked me to help him with a guest lecturer project. Darin is in charge of the class, Global Economics of Food and Agriculture, which is a multidisciplinary graduate class focused on current global trends in the food industry. On the cutting edge, I was interested in h...

This is a special interview where I get on skype and talk to not only Dr. Harris, but his whole class! In terms of content, this is a standard information about me, how my food job rocks, the life of a food scientist in my eyes, and what I’ve learned podcasting. If you’ve been a long time listener of the show, you’ll realize that I say the same things in previous episodes, or articles but unless y...

Really excited to have Austin on the show. What’s really cool is that he found My Food Job Rocks because he’s a regular listener of Don and Ben’s podcast, Food Safety Talk. Funny how that works, right? So Austin became a regular listener and engaged with me on social media. We now pretty much support each other in everything we do. Austin has his own site, Fur Farm Fork where he posts really techn...

So this is part of the graduate student series, a series launched last year about graduate school. Even though Cat and Meg are graduate students, they have taken a different path. And this path is actually getting more popular. Cat and Meg are both getting their Masters of Professional Studies Designed for professions who want to transition into the food industry, this program is sprouting up ever...

I stumbled upon Stephanie’s podcast and discovered that her episode count was the same as mine. Curious, I checked out her site and her clean, bright, and crisp platform contrasted my dark, grimy and unartistic website. I sent her a quick email and got a response back, and here we are today. Stephanie is located in Charleston South Carolina and travels all over the southern United States to eat fo...

During my chat with Ken Burgin, we went on a lot of tangents, and they all crossed a common theme, which is building an online platform. In random spots of Ken’s interview, we end up talking about different areas of internet marketing and content generation and I thought it would make more sense to snip and stitch this content to a bonus episode. And I did this for a couple of reasons. One being t...

I met Ken when he commented on an article I posted. I think it was the one on how podcasting changed my life. Ken mentioned his experience podcasting in the food industry so we got to talking and decided to swap interviews. You can listen to my interview on Ken’s podcast on the show notes. Ken is what I like to call, an authority in the restaurant management industry. He’s had a restaurant for yea...

Sometimes you just browse the internet and you see a product that just is so noticeable that you have to take a look at it. This is Hugh Thomas’ company Ugly Drinks in a nutshell. A bright, light blue can with various bold flavors, and the U looks like a tongue, like it’s teasing you. Not only that, but Ugly Drink’s clever marketing campaign is eye catching and a bit tongue in cheek! Ugly Drinks w...

I met Dr. Sarah Ramirez in my last year in college. She was a temporary lecturer for Cal Poly and she enjoyed learning about the extracurriculars around the department, so I immediately thought she was cool. Soon, I took one of her classes about Food Waste and we’ve been friends ever since. She might be the only professor I had in Cal Poly that I see on a semi-regular basis and that’s mainly becau...